We live in Scottsdale Arizona, but we purchased our ATS (Performance Collection, RWD, 2.0T, M6) from Royal in Tucson (about a 150 mile drive).

Royal gave us a better price than any of the Phoenix area dealers by a large margin. And they were the only dealer in Arizona that did not play any of the cliche car dealer games.

Our salesperson (Brad Bergman) was very knowledgeable and kept us up to date on our order status. When Cadillac or the railroads delayed the shipping and caused the car to get here a few days after my wife's birthday (it was to be a present), Royal sent a dozen roses to her on her birthday.

I was impressed with their ability to think outside the box. For example: If GM or the railroads couldn't say where the car was, just activate OnStar for the car and get the GPS coordinates just as you would for a stolen car. LoL.

The car was to be a cash purchase but a 36 month zero percent financing incentive became available before the car arrived. We decided to use that and keep the purchase money working for us. Brad remembered that I had mentioned we keep our property in a trust and gave me a heads up about possible issues with financing in the name of a trust.

And their Finance Department was actually more fun than a root canal. No hard sell for extended warranties, Tru-Coat, etc.. I didn't even have to fill out a credit app. They had an on-line application to fill out the day before and it just asked for name, address SSN, income and not much else. It took less than 2 minutes to fill out.

But that was also the only substandard part of the experience. It seems Royal uses a 3rd party to process the application and use an iframe to imbed the application into a NON secured web page on the Royal web site. That made it impossible to know if the data in the application was being sent encrypted and left it vulnerable to being hacked even if it was. I knew how to open the iframe in its own browser window to eliminate those exposures but a lot of people either wouldn't know or take the time and put their personal information at risk.

Back to the good stuff..... It's a low percentage, but there are some horror stories out there about repairs made to cars damaged before delivery without the buyer being aware. Every state allows a certain amount of that. The horror stories usually involve a dealer making repairs in a way that causes problems later. So to make sure I am aware of any repairs, whenever I order a car, I insist the dealer not touch it after its unloaded from the car hauler until I can inspect it. Some dealers won't do that or say they will and then just say whoops knowing you are unlikely to cancel over that after a long wait for the car. No problems with Royal in that regard. They sat my car aside when it arrived on a Thursday. When I saw it on Friday, it still had the plastic sheets the car is shipped with and a month's worth of dust on it.

I've probably purchased somewhere between 30 and 40 new vehicles and I think this was the best experience of any of them.

I just wish Royal was in the Phoenix area, because Tucson is too far to go for routine maintenance.